--The forest thickens as I tread cautiously through it. The trees are old here. It's ground nobody wants, not worth building here. It is wet and mossy, a slow, low energy kind of place.

I wander down the valley. The ground slowley flattening as I approach the plain. The forest is thinning a little, less water. I'm heading towards some structure we built a while back. Probably the hoarde are hanging around it, doing nefarious deeds.

I spot some structre through the distance. I take a knee and flip my helmet to zoom in. The structure is, intact for the moment. Blue light flickers around one side. There are a bunch of hoarde trying to pry things loose. I move laterally, edging closer and looking for a good spot to power up my cannon.

I find a little mound of dirt next to a tree. Good aural camouflage. The hoarde are as yet oblivious, they are banging away at the structure, trying to pry off an antenna or unscrew some bolts. It's not even the full moon yet.

I look down at my gun and thumb the warm up button. The controller chirps in my ear 'warm up sequence initiated'. It's a woman's voice. No hell like a woman's scorn.

The cannnon starts its long wind up sequence. The atmosphere intake covers slide away and the main compression chamber starts to spin, a dull whirring.

The cannon contains a lot of energy, a part kenetic, part electromagnetic and part heat weapon. Covers all the bases. It throws a lot of matter around, drawing anything condensable from the atmosphere to use as mass.

'covers open, main chamber at operation velocity in 40 seconds'

The cannon is still, but at the intermediary speeds between off and on it gets loud. Loud enough to attract attention. Kind of a two-for. It starts to emit a low frequency hum.

'warming heat exchanger'

The weapon has a small safe fusion power supply. The main chamber is a high tech version of a conical water pump, spinning at hypersonic speeds, with a fusion/ liquid heat exchanger and an ioniser at the barrel tip.

'main chamber operational in 30 seconds'

I'm holding the gun near the ground. The hum is turning into a low boom. Some of the little hoarde can hear something, but the hum is too low to be directional yet. They start calling out, altering the gathering.

'activating kenetic stabilisers'

The weapon spits out a lot of atmosphere as kenetic stabilers. The condensible parts of the atmosphere make up the main mass. The liquid projectile is spun up in a tube. The firing end of the tube is flexed. This creates a firing cone which ejects the projectile down the firing line.

'main chamber operational in 15 seconds'

The hoard are getting agitated. The are starting to swarm, looking and listening for the source of the sound. I duck behind the tree, but one of them may have glimpsed me before hand.

'main chamber operational in 10 seconds'

When the cannon fires, the projectile travels down the fusion heat exchange chamber where it gets flash heated to plasma. As it leaves the weapon, the blob is ionised to make it stickier.

I peek back around the tree. Several hoarde are staring at me across the distance.

--Sunday was the Naenae triathlon. My first. Finished without injury. Also the shortest of the season.

mr_graphic_designer has made me a video! Run d3vo run! It is a short section of video. I'm running about 5 minute kms here. Looks like I'm out for a sunday stroll. People keep telling me I could be a daemon runner if I just ran faster, now I kind of see what they are getting at. I'm covering more than a metre with each step mind. I'm at about 200 metres a minute here despite the casual look.

At this point I am starting to melt at this point. This is about 3.5 kms into the 4km run. The chick in front of me left me for dead in the cycle leg, fyi.

I went out fast in the run, got quote hot. Despite the look of the weather I needed to go running in a singlet that day. I get well hot when I run sub 5 minute kms. Hot baby, hot. Hot like an oven. An oven on fire. Melting metal, flames ... I digress.

I got on the road proper at 20 mins, which meant I ran fairly well and didn't muck around in the transition.

The cycling went fairly well. At about 47 mins in, or 27 minutes after I started cycling, which is about 25 minutes after mr_west_end started cycling, mr_west_end overtook me. Which was wholely expected. He is daemon fast cyclist.

The wind was strong. Strong baby. Strong like an oven. A farm oven ... I digress again.

I got bad stitch as soon as I jumped in the water. I needed to practice drinking and swimming more probably. Official times linkage to follow. Any get any photos?

--I completed a triathlon this morning, but what is on my mind is the guy from dancing this afternoon.

There is this thing called the t-dance where rock and roll, ballroom and swing dancers go meet to dance. This works fairly well as you need to rest a lot when you dance, the band plays all three with some additional swing in the bands breaks.

So anyway during a set of ballroom music, after the chacha, I'm talking with a guy from swing. We can hear that a couple are dancing ballroom with tap shoes and keeping excellent time to the music.

A women wearing yellow ballroom/ tap shoes dances into view. As I catch a glimpse of the guy he stops dancing and leans forward to say something to his follow. They are an old pair.

At this point he starts to collapse, but on the way down has a kind of spasm a lands very heavily head first then back. There is a distinctive sound that is made when a human head hits something. It sounded to me like he hit his head square on the floor. He goes down with his left arm bent toward his chest.

Some people crowd around. The bank keeps playing for a while.

Eventually the band stops and the room is fairly quiet.

They little gathering first turns him on his side, then puts him back on his back. Then they establish that he is not breathing. Someone fishes a small bottle of pills out of his top pocket. Someone applies nitro glisterene spray. Then they move him to a side room and start CPR.

They move right past me and to get the side room which was behind where I was standing. He is a distinctive shade of purple that I believe is associated with heart attack victims.

Someone has called 111 and they find the place eventually. The ambulence people do CPR for a while. After about half an hour one of the ambulence people examines the back way out of the place.

They cart the guy out the front way. As far as I know they did not revive him, he certainly wasn't conscious. I presume that they declared him dead at the scene, but that isn't the kind of thing you announce at the time.

If you are unconscious after they have attempted to revive you after you have turned purple, I belive that means you are dead and have died of a heart attack.

Didn't know the guy. Most of the people there seemed to think he would be OK, and kept on dancing. Didn't feel right to me so I peeled. Will blog more about that later.

Luck guy, he died with his tap shoes on. Probably dead in a few seconds from what I saw which was about three metres away. Rest in peace.

Been super busy this week. Mum is in hospital with her bi-yearly always potentially life threatening twisted bowel problems. She is on the mend and on the mind, will run her home today.

I got a set of these for my bedroom. They are some non-crappy self powered speakers that are basically very good for listening to trance and house in a bedroom. And they look cool, they are ipod white. Got some Paul Oakenfold on right now.

I'm in next weekends little Naenae triathlon on Sunday. My preparation this weekend has been to do a decent amount of cycling, running and swimming with one of those being a challenging session.

I chose to cycle first mid Saturday with mr_west_end and mr_houserenovator. We did the triathlon course but from the point closest to mr_west_end. It is a loop track through the hutt.

For some running I ran with ms_cycling_godess. She hadn't done any beach running. We ran the petone beach end to end and back on the sand and over the driftwood. It was fairly tough because there was a lot of debris on the beach that you had to leap over and weave around. Good fun but. ms_cycling_godess says her average heartbeat was 169, which was tribute to our fastish pace. We ran it in 55 minutes which is a good time. It is a tougher ran than a 10k flat run.

Today I went swimming, again with ms_cycling_godess. She taught me about cupping my hands properly and got me swimming a little more streamlined through the water. I might be able to lane swim properly by the end of the year.

To relax I played d&d tonight with mr_storysmith and his storylings. We are a happy bunch of storylings. Except that one of us died. It seems his dice don't like people not from NZ. There was no disintegration so we can bring him back to life.

When he comes back to life either our characters or the storylings should go to the pub to celebrate.

We were picked up to go the the airfield, Taupo's main airport. From there we were shown some videos, told about various packages and weighed.

We then bumbed around for a while. I did a few yoga stretchs and breathing exercies and tried to stay calm. Not very easy.

Loz felt the need to dance near constantly to the breakbeats playing in the hanger. At this point I had a feeling not dissimilar to that before I ran my first half marathon. The difference with a half marathon is that picking up some sort of minor injuring doing those is normal. Similar wo to go time however.

After about half an hour of waiting we got suited up. Next we waited around for our tandem people to get to the ground and come over to meet us.

My tandem person was called Lynette. I hard looking determined woman, I later learned she does iron man events.

Next up we get shuffled into the plane. Off-black proclaimed at the time that the plane was a model that was a derivative of a crop dresser. Notice the roller door.

It is a small plane, you cannot stand up inside it.

The flight up was fun. There is a certain responsiveness you get in a small plane whereby you can feel what the pilot is doing with the controls if you know how to fly yourself.

The clouds where pretty, we flew south-ish from the airport. I could see logging operations and a small lakelet thingy that drained into the main lake through a narrow channel.

The flight up was actually quite relaxing for the most part. At some points I had thoughts about how this is a perfectly good plane and the jumping part really was a contrary thing to do.

The clouds should there was a lot of thermal diversity on the ground. On the way up my buddy attached me to her. She also showed me how high we were using the altimeter on her wrist. The plane was unpressurised.

Before long the roller door was opened and we were shuffling out of the plane very quickly. I was jumper number 3. Floatsam went first, then Loz, then me. You had to shuffle with your buddy towards the door. About 15 seconds a jumper or so. Terribly efficient.

Here is a picture of my face just before I jump out of the plane. You'll notice I have an expression on my face that isn't very together.

At this point my legs were dangling outside, with 12,000 feet of air and clouds between me and the ground.

There were two layers of cloud that day, one at 12,000 feet and one at 5,000 feet. Somehow I managed to avoid both of these.

They way you get out he door is that your "tandem master" pushes you out, without warning. This bit is kind of scary. I didn't scream but I did hold my breath for a few seconds. I had a kind of this-just-isnt-natural kind of feeling going through my head.

We we went out the door we fell forward and rotated just through the vertical. Lynette led us through a manouver she later described as a kind of barrel roll.

You then procede to tumble through the air for a while. When your buddy has got you falling controllably they deploy a drouge and you get some controlled freefall.

You get tapped on the shoulder as a signal to stick your arms out. The sensation on my ungloved hands was similar to when you rummage around in a tin of flour.

The noise is hard to describe. When you are pushed out of the plane it is the aural equivalent of diving into a pool. The normal hearing sensations are replaced with a multitonal rushing noise. It is loud but doesn't make your ears ring.

You are freefalling at a rate big enough to see the landscrape grow larger as you look. It is kind of mesmerising.

The clarity of the landscape and the clouds without the imposition of a window is spectacular. It is a beautiful earth we live on.

The parachute opened fairly gently, certainly not less comfortable than when you fall during rock climbing. I had carfeully adjusted my crown jewels before leaving the plane. My face and hands tingled from the cold as we slowed down.

I heard the earth sing to me on the plane on the way up, and also as we parachutted down. I think the earth has a multitonal voice that is womanly and motherly.

The landing was very soft, like comming off a gentle slide. I was relieved more than exilirated, but I smiled a lot as did everybody else.

I think I find snowboarding more of a rush and rope swings scarier, but it is certainly an experience and very beautiful. I'm sure I'll go again sometime, but not anytime soon.